MSc ICT Student: ID: #56579 RENNIE RAMLOCHAN THE UNIVERSITY OF TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO Multimedia Technologies Assignment 1

The Virtual Museum Project Video is being streaming over the Internet. Video streaming over the Internet is difficult because the Internet only offers best effort service. That is, it provides no guarantees on bandwidth, delay jitter, or loss rate. Specifically, these characteristics are unknown and dynamic. The bandwidth available between two points in the Internet is generally unknown and time-varying. If the sender transmits faster than the available bandwidth then congestion occurs, packets are lost, and there is a severe drop in video quality. If the sender transmits slower than the available bandwidth then the receiver produces sub-optimal video quality. The goal to overcome the bandwidth problem is to estimate the available bandwidth and than match the transmitted video bit rate to the available bandwidth. To avoid the undesirable symptoms of congestion, control procedures called rate control or congestion control are often employed to limit the amount of network load. The end-to-end delay that a packet experiences may fluctuate from packet to packet. This variation in end-to-end delay is referred to as the Delay jitter. Delay jitter is a problem because the receiver must receive/decode/display frames at a constant rate, and any late frames resulting from the delay jitter can produce problems in the reconstructed video, e.g. jerks in the video. This problem is typically addressed by including a play out buffer at the receiver. A play out buffer /Caching allows nodes to quickly fetch the required documents without incurring annoying delays by circumventing the need to contact the original host. While the play out buffer can compensate for the delay jitter, it also introduces additional delay. The third fundamental problem is losses. A number of different types of losses may occur, depending on the particular network under consideration. For example, wired packet networks such as the Internet are afflicted by packet loss, where an entire packet is erased (lost). On the other hand, wireless channels are typically afflicted by bit errors or burst errors. Losses can have a very destructive effect on the reconstructed video quality. To combat the effect of losses, a video streaming system is designed with error control classes such as: (1) forward error correction, (2) retransmissions, (3) error concealment, and (4) error-resilient video coding. The goal of error-resilient video coding is to design the video compression algorithm and the compressed bit stream so that it is resilient to specific types of errors. Scalable coding essentially prioritizes the video data, and this prioritization effectively supports intelligent discarding of the data. For example, the enhancement data can be lost or discarded while still maintaining usable video quality. The different priorities of video data can be exploited to enable reliable video delivery by the use of unequal error protection (UEP), prioritized transmission, etc. Video Window Size: The digital video stores a lot of information about each pixel in each image/frame. It takes time to display those pixels on your computer screen. If the window size is small, then the time taken to draw the pixels is less. If the window size is large, there may not be enough time to display the image or single frame before it's time to start the next one and any late frames may result in delay jitter that can produce problems in the reconstructed video, e.g. jerks in the video. 3Ways to solve this problem: (1) Choose an appropriate window size. The reduction of the window size to anything less than the size or resolution of the original video source will involve some sort of compression. This is because the same information is being represented but in less space. Note Reducing the window size may not always; therefore, produce desirable results and will depend upon the content of the video.(2)Make Use of Fast hard discs to enabling each frame to be read from the disc faster. (3)Make Use of hardware accelerated playback, eg graphic cards now include facilities for acceleration and video playback. Frame Rates: The issues here are similar to those above - too many pixels and not enough time to move the data from hard disc or CD to screen. One way to overcome this is to compress the data so that less data is transferred from disc to screen. At smaller window sizes eg 160 x 120 pixels, video played at reduced frame rates is acceptable. At larger window sizes, the video can sometimes appear jerky.

Image Quality: The image quality will depend on the quality of the original source and the degree of compression used. A lower setting will result in greater compression and smaller file sizes but the quality of the resulting video sequence will be reduced. References: http:// www.encyclopedia.jrank.org http:// www.ietf.org/rfc http://www.iit.bas.bg http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2002/HPL-2002-260.pdf